OLC Webinar: Tell Me Your Story: Building Engagement and Inclusion in Online and Hybrid Courses with Digital Storytelling Methods

Stories are powerful educational tools. Digital storytelling is a creative and meaningful way to build engagement and inclusion in online and hybrid courses through the use of computer-based tools, including digital media essays, photography exhibits, story-based mapping, and podcasts, to tell stories. Digital storytelling allows learners to connect on a personal level and cognition skills are improved through writing narratives that are enhanced with the use of digital media methods. The student of the future is a maker and it is imperative to have knowledge, skills, and capabilities around content creation and communication. Digital storytelling assignments give students transferable skills that are applied to a 21st-century job market.

In this webinar, the presenters will demonstrate various digital storytelling techniques and projects along with templates, rubrics, and media applications that have been applied to online and hybrid courses that have included students from diverse learning communities made of multilingual, intergenerational, and neurodivergent participants. These strategies have proven to contribute to an overall inclusive learning environment in which all students perceive to be valued and continue successfully in their process of life-long learning. Session attendees will join in a digital storytelling activity to sample how to facilitate similar assignments and projects for easy adoption into their courses.

Intended Audience:

Faculty and instructors, instructional designers, instructional technologists

Speakers:

Sonia Chaidez

Senior Instructional Technologist – Whittier College

Stephanie Carmona

Program manager, Community Education Program Initiative (CEPI) – Whittier College

Register for this Online Learning Consortium webinar.